A brief genealogy of the creatives behind Forbidden Planet

When we open Return to the Forbidden Planet on June 12 (previews are June 10-11), you’re going to find a lights-out, all-star group of artists in every area of the production. Many of these folks are also intricately linked, not only to one another but the space and of course the genres that are mashed up within the show. A small sampling, and I’m going to do my best here to keep it brief

This is more trivia than you could shake a stick at:

* Jonathan Harrison (Captain Tempest) and Heather Krueger (Science Officer/Gloria) are both true veterans of the Jaeb with what’s likely thousands of performances under their belt together on that stage. My personal favorite was watching them play opposite one another as Seymour and Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors.

*Jonathan and Mark Warren (guitar and theremin) are both in the The Vodkanauts, Tampa Bay’s iconic award-winning power lounge quintet. The ‘nauts have also played almost every single one of our Jobsite Rocks! events at New World Brewery and will be playing our Gala in October.

*Jonathan also isn’t a stranger to Shakespeare, straight up or ‘on the rocks:’ he appeared in our production of Titus Andronicus and was part of Joe Popp’s groundbreaking version of Macbeth in the Park in 1998. Joe claims to have “discovered” Jonathan from the local music scene, but we’ll let those two fight it out …

*Speaking of Shakespeare straight up or on the rocks, there are other connections. J. Elijah Cho (Bosun) and Spencer Meyers (Cookie) were in our production of Much Ado About Nothing, J. Elijah and Maggie Mularz (Navigation Officer) also both appeared in our production of Macbeth. Amy Gray (Miranda) was in our production of The Taming of the Shrew, and was just seen on stage in the Jaeb throughout the run of Disenchanted. As far as Shakespeare that rocks, who could forget Amy and Spencer as the eunuch friar and naughty nun in our adaptation Pericles: Prince of Tires?

* Not enough rock? We have the entirety of the Hedwig and the Angry Inch from our sold-out season opener: Spencer, Amy, J. Elijah as well as Jana Jones (music director and bass) and Woody Bond (drums).

* Our piano and synth player, Parker Wilkson, was also our pianist for another cult hit, Gorey Stories. Our first run of Gorey featured Spencer and Jaime while the second featured Amy and Spencer.

* My tie to the Jaeb is in that it was the site of my very first bit of professional work when I moved to Tampa, Whirligig, which featured Broadway’s Kissy Simmons and music from Joe Popp, who I’d go on to collaborate with on a lot of other projects.

I’ve likely left some threads, feel free to post them. This list above is also not even the whole of our cast and crew, just those who had an obvious tie to rock, to Shakespeare in the area or the Jaeb stage directly.